Passacaglia in D Minor

Buxtehude’s Passacaglia in D minor helps explain why the young Johann Sebastian Bach was prepared to walk nearly 250 miles from Ansbach to Lübeck to hear its celebrated composer play the organ of St. Mary’s Church. This audacious work, among 63 keyboard pieces compiled and copied by Bach’s eldest brother and others, perhaps began life as an improvisation above a simple seven-note bassline. It probably dates from later in Buxtehude’s life and appears to have influenced Bach’s monumental Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. Buxtehude repeats his ostinato bass on the organ’s pedal board 28 times, avoiding monotony by modulating from the composition’s home key of D minor to create sections in F major and A minor before returning to D minor. He plays with the creative possibilities of repetition, catching the ear with a prolonged two-note trill at the midpoint and again towards the work’s close with metronomic octave leaps in the organ’s right-hand part. Brahms, a great authority on early German music, was enchanted by its inventive brilliance as was Nobel Prize-winning author Hermann Hesse, who mentions Buxtehude’s Passacaglia in his novel Demian.